One giant leap: 40 years later, Apollo moon landing remains pivotal

First of two parts.

"I believe this nation should commit itself to the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."— President John F. Kennedy, 1961

At 2:18 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, July 20, 1969 — more than three days and 239,000 miles from home, eight years after the first humans had entered space and the U.S. president had issued a challenge to put a man on the moon — the odd-looking little Eagle spacecraft was 500 feet from the first lunar landing and in trouble.

An alarm was sounding and a yellow light was blinking. The on-board computer was registering boulders in the Sea of Tranquility landing site. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin would have to maneuver around them manually to a safer site. Armstrong burned the engines 70 more seconds than plans called for to find a safer spot about four miles away.

"Forward, forward, good. Forty feet," Armstrong told Manned Spacecraft Center mission controllers in Houston. "Picking up some dust … Drifting to the right … Contact light.

OK. Engine stop!"

Armstrong's voice was calm. But his heart wasn't, racing twice the usual rate at 156 beats per minute.

The cool atmosphere of the previous three days of the mission was now thick with tension.

"We could tell something wasn't right, but we didn't know what or how worried the center flight personnel were for a while after," former Deseret News science reporter Hal Knight said last week, recalling the events that day as one in a throng of news people from around the world gathered in the auditorium of mission control in Houston.

Aborting the mission had become a real possibility, but at the same time an impossibility — only 30 seconds of fuel remained.

"It was the moment I remember best and was one of many that made the lunar landing one of the rare times when real life is more dramatic than any novel or movie could ever make it," Knight said of his two-week assignment to cover the launch.

Knight had an insider's feel of the mission-control center, courtesy of a personal, other-press-prohibited guided tour a few days earlier by his old Jordan High School classmate Don Lind, an Apollo astronaut who wouldn't get to go to the moon but would fly with the Shuttle Spacelab-3 mission in 1985.